Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation on Linux

By : James Freeman
Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation on Linux

By: James Freeman

Overview of this book

Automation is paramount if you want to run Linux in your enterprise effectively. It helps you minimize costs by reducing manual operations, ensuring compliance across data centers, and accelerating deployments for your cloud infrastructures. Complete with detailed explanations, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book will teach you how to manage your Linux estate and leverage Ansible to achieve effective levels of automation. You'll learn important concepts on standard operating environments that lend themselves to automation, and then build on this knowledge by applying Ansible to achieve standardization throughout your Linux environments. By the end of this Linux automation book, you'll be able to build, deploy, and manage an entire estate of Linux servers with higher reliability and lower overheads than ever before.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Core Concepts
5
Section 2: Standardizing Your Linux Servers
10
Section 3: Day-to-Day Management
16
Section 4: Securing Your Linux Servers

Understanding Ansible variables

Most of the examples we have looked at so far have been static in nature. This is fine for the simplest playbook examples, but in many cases, it is desirable to be able to either store values or define them easily in a central place, rather than having to go hunting through a playbook (and tree of roles) for a specific hardcoded value. As in other languages, it is also desirable to capture values somehow, for reuse later.

There are many different types of variables in Ansible, and it is important to know that they have a strict order of precedence. Although we won't encounter this much in this book, it is important to be aware of this, as you might otherwise receive unexpected results from your variables.